I’ve got seeds. And you can have them — for as little as emailing me your Gifts for Gardeners suggestions.

For gardeners, seeds really are the ultimate stocking stuffer. A gift that even little kids can afford. They’re sheer potential, all wrapped up in a tiny little packet. They’re a gift for the mind, spawning garden dreams. A gift for the eyes, with their splendid photos and drawings. And there’s that little rattle they make: a deep bass for fat beet or sunflower seeds, an almost inaudible whisper for tiny native perennials. If you’ve got only little money, but big gratitude for a gardener, just order them a bunch of seed catalogs online, then stick a ten-spot in the pages. Got none? Draw up a gift certificate for an afternoon of your time (but you do gotta make good on the promise).

What have I got in my garden pocketses? I’ve got a pocketful of Botanical Interests seeds: Frinched Sage (Artemisia frigida) and Nodding Onion (Allium cernuum), from their new Botanic Gardens Series; Gourmet Baby Greens, a blend of heirloom lettuces that I’ve tried myself and that will keep your salad bowls colorful and interesting; Gourmet Blend beets; and the gorgeous, deep-purple Lauren’s Grape Poppy (Papaver somniferum). Fire up your send buttons, contestants! This five-pack of seeds gets given away next week, when I’ll announce my next garden giveaway on Friday. And here’s a hint: This Sunday’s going to be a great day to photograph plants with winter interest — one of the ways you can win these seeds. Bonus points for capturing wildlife enjoying what you’ve planted.

Send those photos to sclotfelter@denverpost.com. If it’s just a gift suggestion, you can post it on the comments here.

I do. And you can win them from me — merely by sharing your own gift idea and a picture of a plant with winter interest. But first, this public service announcement from the Colorado State Division of Cuteness:

Danielle Emrich with her prize-winning cabbage

That’s Denver third-grader Danielle Emrich from Carson Elementary, and she’s got herself a prize-winning colossus of a cabbage there. She’s getting a $1,000 education savings bond from Bonnie Plants. The company, whose veggie plants you’ve surely seen for sale at any garden center you stumble into in spring, runs a third-grade gardening program and the students all grow the company’s giant cabbage variety (“Bonnie O.S. Cross”). Each class picks a winner whose name is then entered in a statewide drawing. Last year, 1.5 million kids in 45 states participated. Danielle was Colorado’s winner. Talk about laying down the slaw.

And finally, I brought in the mailbag to find something announcing itself as “The Most Important Gift Catalog in the World.” Now that would seem a pretty pompous claim, but the catalog was from Heifer International, which is the organization that presents needy rural families with livestock, ranging from bees to water buffalo, and the training to raise them. Participants in the program must agree to share the offspring of the gift with another needy family in the area, so the gift keeps on giving. Imagine: For $20, you can give a family a flock of chickens to run around in their garden, eating bugs and laying eggs and producing compost. Or a trio of rabbits, or a hive of bees. A share of a sheep is only $10. If you’ve got money for plants, you’ve got ten bucks.

Yes, it’s important to give locally, and I hope you’ll do so, even if canned goods from the back of the pantry or last year’s winter coat. If you can spare cash and need a good local cause, check out Season to Share, The Denver Post’s annual holiday giving campaign where your contribution is matched 50 cents on the dollar by the McCormick Foundation, and the entire donation and match go directly to the nonprofit agency.

There’s nothing on the calendar now between you and the holidays. Gardeners have huge hearts, and I know you’ll find it in yours to do something that can make a huge difference for someone.

Gardeners, generally modest people, need to gloat more. I took a long, circuitous path to this revelation. This is how I got there.

The salad that wouldn't die: improvised cold frame in Denver.

My co-workers, some gardeners, some not, have turned me into a fan of “True Blood,”HBO’s series based on a the Charlaine Harris novels set in Louisiana. The show — of which I’ve only watched the first season on DVD, so no spoilers, please! — focuses on telepathic barmaid Sookie Stackhouse and newly-come-back-to-his-ancestral-home rumpled-and-vulnerable vampire Bill Compton. It’s a series simply made for those of us who love men and all the ways they torture themselves (when we don’t happen to be torturing them ourselves.)

In Episode 2, on a moonlight walk, a smitten Sookie teases Bill, in that way soon-to-be-lovers do, asking, “Can you turn into a bat?”

“No,” Bill admits. “There are those who can change form, but I’m not one of them.”

“Can you turn invisible?” “Sorry.”

“Well, Bill, it seems you’re not a very good vampire,” Sookie mock-scolds, her undead suitor’s hand in hers, as they stroll the verdant southern night. “Just what can you do?”

And Bill, who only 24 hours before had resurrected the barmaid from what would likely have been a fatal beating, gets a look in his eye. It’s a look that says, “I could be an egotistical jerk and gloat about this, but I’m too gentlemanly to do that.” Instead, he merely deadpans, with only a hint of smugness, “I can bring you back to life,” and shoulders past her. (If you’re a fan of the show, btw, don’t miss the recaps on Television Without Pity.)

What’s the connection to gardening? Well, if you planted one seed this year, if you got a single red tomato or one batch of fragrant pesto, put one meal on the table, shared one single red bouquet with a neighbor, you have to seize this moment, when the world is tucked under its sleepy snow blanket and isn’t watching, to gloat. You’ve got the right.

Gloat now, gardener, because there’s a long, long winter coming. Rest and sharpen tools and plan your bulb-planting and soil-amending and compost-cooking. Come this weekend’s thaw — and it will thaw, because that’s just how Colorado rolls — get ready to cut kale, plant blood-red tulips, toast pumpkin seeds, bake apples, poach some chicken and slap that pesto all over it. And oh, if you’ve got them, savor those winter-thwarting greens, like Kate and Rod’s elegant little improvised cold frame that survived the snow dump just fine, thank you.

Live hungry. Wallow in red wherever you can find it. Your own marinara from hard-won tomatoes. That last clutch of beets you dug. Wonder of wonders, a lone, scarlet heirloom carrot surviving in a bed planted a whole year ago. Bite deep into the veins of life, and the veins of rainbow chard. Crave color. Ravish the dirt. Laugh in the face of the old year’s death. Garden like a vampire, knowing that your harvests will be both fleeting, and forever on your tongue.

And yes, gloat, even if it’s just a little, even if it scares you. Because what is this crazy-stupendous thing? What did you just do? Oh. Yeah. You made food from dirt. That’s all.

If you’re thinking you’ve missed your window for reaping the best of your local farmer’s market, think again. Many of them are open through the end of October, though not all. This handy site has dates and locations for markets statewide. This weekend and the coming week, though, will be the last call, though, for many markets in Greeley, Denver Boulder, Colorado Springs, Aurora, Littleton — that’s just a few.

(In some towns — Fort Collins is one of them — winter markets will keep you stocked with local produce, eggs, meat, cheese, and other items — until weekly markets start to open again in April.)

One thing to keep in mind is just how hard these folks work to bring you those farm-fresh eats throughout the growing season. I was a customer at a market the weekend of Oct. 10 and 11, when the mercury had read 16 degrees when a before-dawn volunteer crew hauled out pop-up tents and tables and fliers and brochures and a machine that supplied “market bucks” so customers don’t have to run somewhere else to hit an ATM. For a morning market that opens at 8 a.m., those volunteers often show up before 6 a.m. That weekend, they rotated in and out of hot cars and the lobby of a nearby Masonic Temple to avoid having to call in medics for hypothermia.

And the farmers aren’t showing up a whole lot later than the staff. A 6:30 a.m. arrival is about average — and they’ve often had a lot longer drive. A tamale maker got stopped on I-25 for three hours on that snowy weekend because the road had closed. She got there a half-hour before the market closed — but she got there, sliding steaming tamales into the frozen fingers of shoppers and staffers.

Then there are the countless hours growers spend in the fields, or the hours driving, or the hours tearing down their tents and tables. Think about it: a lot of days, those farmers eat fast food because they’re so busy bringing you the best food their land — or land they rent — can produce. It’s anything but an easy life.

It grieved me to know that two of my favorite farmers were shutting down after the last Saturday market at the Larimer County Courthouse, to go off on adventure, to see if there was a place where they could make a living from making food, somewhere where the land is cheaper. I’ve learned tons from their booth, about Amish speckled lettuce and how divinely it keeps in the fridge, about crunchy, sweet, white spring turnips, About just how beautiful and bountiful one tiny corner booth at a farmer’s market can look. They’re a small vendor, but I’ll mourn their loss.

So if your local farmer’s market is still running, go. Buy an heirloom pumpkin or the standard jack o’lantern variety. Buy some fall radishes or lettuce. Some chard, beets, parsnips, squash. Some delicata, butternut, buttercup, hubbard. Squash keeps. It’s good for you. Fill a bag.

Despite that final feeling that always invades when I pull the last tomatoes in, the fat lady never really sings for a garden. Or rather, she sings, but then the soundtrack sort of plays in the background until spring, sometimes loud and rollicking, sometimes soft and slow and elegiac.

So you can’t quite face those fall garden cleanup chores yet, with this weekend’s deep freeze coming on? Just think of it as kale-sweetening weather. I like to grow kale, but cooking with it is a challenge. You’ve first got to rip it off those woody stems (I’ve found that doing just that, ripping with your hands, seems fastests) and then steam or blanch and then saute it. And this year, in my Soil Sisters garden at my best friend’s place, we grew several big dinosaur — a.k.a lacinato — kale plants. The challenge of unlocking kale’s nutrition doesn’t daunt cookbook author Terry Walters, though. Her <> “Clean Food” book, gorgeously designed and grouped into seasons, has an amazing buffet of vegetable dishes. (It’s the fat cookbook with the electric green cover that some Barnes and Noble stores were displaying last Monday for 30% off.) I’ll pop one of the easier recipes onto the end of this post.

Meanwhile, even if you don’t want to dig in the dirt this weekend in the cold — or you’re saving all your energy to cheer on the Rockies — there are plenty of reasons to not give up on your garden yet. Jeff Ashton, author of the now-out-of-print-but-still-useful-as-heck “The 12-Month Gardener,“ has some useful tips for fall and winter planting that I’ll share next week.

What’s shaking out there in the garden world? First, there are fall sales at your local garden shop. Look there first for bulbs, soil amendments, fall fertilizers for your lawn and perennials, and sales on gloves, tools, and perennials. Check out The Post’s 2008 perennial planting info before you go.

If you’d rather celebrate than shop, check out the Denver Botanic Gardens at Chatfield’s Pumpkin Festival NEXT Saturday and Sunday, Oct. 17 and 18 (the corn maze will still be there this weekend, the 10-11, but the festival’s been moved). There’s a pumpkin patch with pumpkins for sale, a corn maze and lots of other family fun. The pumpkin patch alone is bigger than 8 acres; there’s hayrides and craft vendors, too, and costumed kids are admitted to the festival (though not the maze) free.

Meanwhile, up north at The Gardens on Spring Creek in Fort Collins, there’s a Halloween festival on Halloween Day, but also a buffet of classes most weekend days through October, including centerpieces this Saturday (10/10 and indoor succulents next Saturday (10/17). (You’ll need to download a .pdf file of the classes for more complete info, or subscribe to the garden’s emailed newsletter.

Here’s Terry Walters’ recipe for Kale with Caramelized Shallots (if you buy just one bunch of kale, this recipe is easily cut in half to serve 3 — or, well, one person if you chow down on greens like I do.)

In large skillet or Dutch oven over medium heat, saute shallots in 1 tablespoon olive oil for 6-8 minutes or until very soft and caramelized. [An interjection from Susan: Shallots go soft for me very quickly, so I plan to caramelize a whole bunch and freeze them.] Add lemon juice and saute another 2-3 minutes to brown. Remove from heat and set aside.

Bring a large pot of water to boil. cut and remove dired stem ends from kale and submerge whole leaes in boiling water for 2-3 minutes or until tender and bright gren. Remove from heat, drain and chop into bite-size pieces. Add kale to pan with shallots and saute one minute. Add remaining 2 tablespoons oil, season to taste with salt and pepper and serve.

Eight pounds of green tomatoes.
One hour kneeling in the dirt and dark.

How do you put a season to bed, on a balmy night before the first snowy morning of the year? The garden work isn’t over; there’s much tidying to be done, and a winter bed to be put in, an homage to hope and spring. And eating, oh, there’s eating to do — right now it’s a ham omelet with the last of the parsley from the brick planter in front of my house, and a chicken breast poaching to be simmered with potatoes and kale and onions for an office dinner. A tiny green lacewing crawls out of the parsley as I chop it, just ahead of the knife.

If you’ve never been in your garden by moonlight, it’s a whole different trip, like milking by braille, groping underneath the tomato cages, hefting the vines for the hidden weight, spying among them for vaguely spherical gleams. The crickets and then the coyotes’ distant call for company. Soon after I arrive at my garden I turn the car lights off; once I’ve ventured deep into its fading jungle they are more hindrance than help. The brittle, silvered leaves whisper as I unlayer their tangles, searching for any lurking denials of summer’s end. I find one last, little, orange squash in the collapsed vines. I pick a few tiny Sungolds and a bounty of Black Pear and Amish Pastes. I learn to guess in the dark at what might be a hint of red, a fading into yellow. But even green and hard as rocks, it’s their time to come in, I tell these wizened, crunching tomato vines. The moon comes out to give me a bit of light. The scents of basil and thyme, bruised by my clumsy feet and knees, waft up, and a donkey’s call echoes in the distance. No smell of snow yet here, on this first foothill west of Loveland, so I know it won’t come until morning. It’s almost balmy. I snap off some dark, bug-nibbled lacinato kale, dig a bit in the carrot and turnip bed, pet the strawberry plants, stumble over a clutch of downed sunflower heads. And look up at a sculpted sky: Waning moon, backlit clouds, a few stars.

We did this, my best friends and I. Against this backdrop of hillside and rock, we made this. Food for more friends, food against the coming of the winter, to share with them and a fire. A new flock of chickens stalks the beds for bugs, tries to hide eggs under the Nanking cherry. The stalks of the too-abundant sunflowers are piled for kindling.

No garden is ever perfect except in one’s mind, and no garden is ever over — there’s always another chore that could be done. But on this last night before snow, there’s a breath of completeness that sighs around the hill, with bird-strewn seeds sinking into the dirt, dried zinnia heads nodding good-bye.

Poach the chicken breast for a half hour in water to cover and the tamarai. Meanwhile, chop the onion coarsely and sweat it over low heat in a heavy, deep pan in a tablspoon of the olive oil and all of the butter. While the chicken poaches, coarsely chop the peppers and add to the heavy pan; ditto the sun-dried tomatoes. When the chicken is done, remove it and let rest. Scrub the potatoes, chop into big bite-size chunks and boil in the same water as the chicken for 20 minutes or until fork-soft. After a little rest, chop the poached chicken breast into bite-size chunks. When the potatoes are done, turn up the heat on the onion pan a bit, add another tablespoon of olive oil, then take out the potatoes with tongs and add them. Once they’re heated, add the chopped chicken and a ladle or two of the chicken-potato broth. Simmer that a bit to let the flavors marry. Add salt and pepper to taste; add the thyme and chopped fresh herbs. Devour hot. Or devour hot with a few shavings of really good cheese, or dollops of goat cheese.

And now, we interrupt your regularly scheduled garden activities for some weather.
If you’re reading this from Colorado’s Front Range, you know that we’re enjoying (or not, as the case may be) a rare day of sky-spit. The drops are almost too fine and too small to be called drizzle, though I know that this could change at any moment. And I know that at some point tonight it will get cold enough for the drops to be called sleet. Our weather is so different here that I tend to forget the “April showers” maxim.

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There’s a certain beauty in the word “pause.” A pause to huddle inside where it’s warm. A pause to gloat, if your plantings are up to schedule; a pause to sigh if they’re not. But mainly, just a pause to think and appreciate the harbingers, like these little wildflower tulips I planted two years ago. I don’t know if they’ll get to bloom; they’ve been so buffeted by unseasonal warmth, then blizzard, then warmth, then snow, then wind, and now frost and spit. Drizzle. Sleet. Spizzle. Wot-cha-call-it. But I’m determined still to treasure their buds. I want to plan for something that blossoms between the bloom of these unabashedly fuchsia plants and the brave little uber-early reticulated irises that stuck defiant yellow tongues out at the March gusts. Maybe it could be a little planter of violas, which recently popped up unexpectedly in a corner of the lawn, where they self-seeded under the forsythia. I’m still waiting on the other bulbs, the white daffodils and the “Minnow” daffs and the late, clay-loving camassias, whose first foliage got battered by the big one-day blizzard.

And thinking about bulbs, and just how much they give back on a day of spizzle like today, brings me to a big Dirt Date coming up in Northern Colorado, or as I like to call it, NoCo. Here are the details from The Gardens on Spring Creek in Fort Collins:

Lauren Springer Ogden on “Hardy Bulbs for Colorado Gardens” April 22 and 29th, 7 – 9 pm
Discover the best performers, from the earliest winter bloomers to the last autumn-flowering treasures, and all the wonderful spring and summer bloomers in between. Good companion plants and naturalizing bulbs in lawns will also be discussed. Springer-Ogden is the author of lots of garden books specific to the West, including:– Plant-Driven Design: Creating Gardens that Honor Plants, Space, and Spirit– Passionate Gardening: Good Advice for Challenging Climates
– The Undaunted Garden: Planting for Weather Resilient Beauty
The class is $25 per class for members / $30 per class for non-members. Call the Gardens to register, 416-2486.

Yes, like many folks with dirty hands, I spent my winter with my nose buried in seed catalogs. Yes, they’re a comfort in the dark of winter when some garden centers aren’t even open. And they’re a great resource for rare and new and heirloom and wacky varieties and braggin’ rights. But had I known there was this, I would have been at my local stores first. That’s Valentine mesclun blend from Botanical Interests, a Colorado company, and I just want to eat that illustration. Or blow it up to poster size and hang it in my kitchen. I may have gotten the large packet just to have a bigger picture of that dead sexy red lettuce. The Valentine mesclun blend includes Marvel of Four Seasons, the lettuce that was still growing strong in my back yard into early December, and Lolla Rossa, the red frilly stuff chefs are currently nuts about.

So after I put that envelope in my basket, I found that Lake Valley Seed, another Colorado seed company, had the mild jalapeno variety, Senorita, that I’d been looking for and several of the other varieties on my list — purple top turnips, Blue Lake beans, black-seeded Simpson lettuce. Lake Valley pushed back when the big seed outfits were pushing for bigger profits and a smaller product line, which would have meant dwindling varieties of veggies available to you (read about that story here).

Both companies actively maintain their racks in your local garden center. These businesses also have folks who are willing to talk to you for a good half-hour about tomato varieties or which beet is best for roots and which is best for greens. They’re geeks’ geeks, nerds’ nerds, and they’re there to run a business, but also because plants are their passion. So don’t forget to support them. They’ve been there and dug that — and with our soil, we need all the borrowed expertise we can get.

By the way, for you shutterbugs out there, Botanical is actively seeking photos of many of their veggie varieties — see their website for which ones. But I do hope they’re not going to move away from their sumptuous botanical illustrations. I’m such a sucker for them that I am no longer allowed to visit the seed racks alone.

I promise, this is my last stump speech about winter watering. But if you’re panicking because of the three-month forecast for Colorado’s Front Range — which doesn’t see a significant snow dump outside of the mountains this spring — here are tips from Denver Botanic Gardens Horticulture Director Sarada Krishnan:

Trees and shrubs: Watch soil moisture, especially if they’re still getting established (first year for small shrubs, one year per trunk diameter for trees). Check the moisture 3 or 4 inches down into the soil. If it’s dry, give the area a slow, gentle soaking. Remember to disconnect the hose at night so pipes don’t freeze.Lawns: Don’t move up aeration and fertilization services. But you can call to book them for March or early April.Vegetables: Hold your horses for a few weeks even on cool-season crops like lettuce. (I’d add this caveat: unless you’ve got a cold frame and/or feel really, really lucky. If you get any to grow, you get bragging rights. I’m going to try it with some 45-day lettuce, in a brick south-facing planter, under permeable clear plastic. I’ll keep you posted.)Bulbs: If they’re blooming, enjoy them while they last. There’s nothing you can do to prolong the blossoms. But if yours are under mulch and not coming up yet, don’t panic. The mulch will keep them a bit cooler a bit longer.Don’t fire up the sprinkler system just yet. That would be asking for a surprise freeze or May blizzard.Still itching to garden? Sharpen tools, clean out leaves, tidy perennials, amend soil, add mulch.
And again, check out CSU extension’s winter-watering info on the web. <NO1.

On the up side, if do get out into this unseasonable sunshine to do those neglected fall cleanup chores, you’ll be getting more vitamin D, and that could mean no spring cold to keep you indoors. So says a study by Harvard and CU.

Susan Clotfelter has always played in the dirt, but got dragged into gardening as an obsession when she reclaimed her hell corner: a weed-infested patch of clay inhabited by one tough, lonely lilac and a thicket of weeds. Along with training as a Colorado State University Extension Master Gardener volunteer, she dug deeper with beds of herbs and lettuce at her home and rows of vegetables wherever she could borrow land. She writes for The Denver Post and other publications and appears on community radio.

Julie's passion for gardening began in spring of 2000 when she bought a fixer-upper in Denver's Park Hill neighborhood, and realized that the landsape was in desperate need of some TLC. During the drought of 2003, she decided to give up on bluegrass and xeriscape her front yard. She wrote about the journey in the Rocky Mountain News, in a series called Mud, Sweat & Tears: A Xeriscape story. Julie is an avid veggie gardener as well as a seasoned water gardener.